Elegantly Wrapped, in Search of Itself

Henri Bendel makes use of every nook of its belle époque interior.Credit
Keith Bedford for The New York Times

THERE is no genre of literature more loathsome than the Beach Book. If anything, summer should encourage more challenging reading. Who wants to work one's way through "Anna Karenina" when it's sleeting outside and we feel like throwing ourselves under a train as it is?

In keeping with the spirit of this column, I would like to recommend one of the great unread novels of the 19th century: Émile Zola's "Ladies' Paradise," one of a 20-installment series of novels in which Zola traced the life of a family through France's Second Empire. "The Ladies' Paradise" is set against the daily workings and power struggles of a French department store, and the characters' fortunes rise and fall with those of the store itself.

Reading "The Ladies' Paradise" recently, I came across a curious passage. Zola describes his fictional store in a way that uncannily mirrors the Henri Bendel of today: "At the far end of the hall, around one of the small cast-iron columns which supported the glass roof, material was streaming down like a bubbling sheet of water. Women pale with desire were leaning over as if to look at themselves. Faced with this wild cataract, they all remained standing there, filled with the secret fear of being caught in the overflow of all this luxury and with an irresistible desire to throw themselves in and be lost."

In its architectural ambition, Henri Bendel is breathtakingly unlike any other department store in New York. Of the three Fifth Avenue mansions it occupies, two are neo-Classical landmarks: the former Rizzoli Building and the Coty Building, the front of which showcases a three-story cascade of 300 windows hand-cut in 1912 with etchings of poppies and vines by René Lalique.

Broad staircases usher customers from floor to floor; balconies on each level of the atrium encourage visitors to view the breadth of the entire place and visually plot out the next boutique they will visit. With its winding wrought-iron stair and balcony railings and hand-painted domed ceilings, Bendel's interior invokes elements of both belle époque and Art Deco, signature themes of the great French couture houses of the last two centuries.

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Balconies look over the atrium so shoppers can visually plot out which boutiques to visit next at Henri Bendel.Credit
Keith Bedford for The New York Times

Three entrances allow shoppers to pass into the store through the consumer viaduct of their choice: directly into the four-story-high central atrium, through the MAC cosmetics boutique or straight into handbags. Last week, from the top floor, I peered over the railing and, like one of Zola's characters, felt as if I were peering down into a limitless warehouse of luxury and desire. I watched as a woman strolled in through the main entrance, knots of shoppers stepping out of the way and unspooling behind her as she passed through the central lobby and past jewelry and disappeared into the makeup and hair-accessories department.

Bendel, whose parent company also owns the Limited and Victoria's Secret chains, does not offer the scope and variety of a Bergdorf Goodman or a Barneys, which are larger stores, but it makes do with what it has, arraying merchandise in rooms of residential scale, and even on the occasional stairway landing, like the Chanel vintage-sunglasses boutique. Like all successful large stores, Bendel presents the shopper with an atmosphere of deliberate disorder, obliging them to travel through numerous galleries until they find what they came looking for, at which point they have also found something else to buy.

The Bendel layout is in constant flux, but generally speaking, in order to find Kevyn Aucoin, you have to pass through MAC and BeneFit. For lingerie by Hanky Panky and Princesse Tam-Tam, you must pass through the portals of custom-made jewelry, the Diane Von Furstenberg landing and the cashmere department. To reach Missoni, you must make it through a gantlet of Cavalli, Collette Dinnigan and Matthew Williamson. To go anywhere, you must pass through the extensive bluejeans department.

For all its artful arraying, though, I have not found anything I wanted to buy during the course of three visits over the last year. The company Web site describes the Bendel ethos as "youthful New York glamour at its finest." Somewhere along the way, I must have ceased to be young and glamorous. At least I'm still from New York.

Another reason could be that Bendel doesn't present a coherent identity to me. Yes, you can buy Rock & Republic jeans and scores of the tiny cotton dresses the likes of which Britney Spears always appears to be busting out of, but steps away you're encouraged to try on a floor-length silk-chiffon beaded caftan, which my grandmother, even in her most grandmotherly of decades, would not have been seen dead in. So, what is it: youthful chic or old-lady Bendel bonnets? I still can't tell.

Perhaps the store has become just the ornate presentation device for Frédéric Fekkai's new 10,000-square-foot hair and beauty emporium, which with its theatrical lighting and Wi-Fi Internet service (and a separate men's area, with chairs that face flat-screen TV's tuned to ESPN) inhabits Bendel's top floor.

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A lingerie boutique at Henri Bendel.Credit
Keith Bedford for The New York Times

Then again, it could be that Bendel doesn't present a uniform identity to me because it has been renovating each floor one at a time, seemingly trying to figure out which merchandise from one belongs in the next.

BENDEL certainly has artistic visions grander than those of your typical Fifth Avenue department store. Hand-blown glass from One Sixty Glass in Brooklyn and work by a painter and photographer are arranged near the home department, with its eccentric offerings of fine china and rubber-duck bath toys based on celebrities.

An exhibition of photographs by Coke Wisdom O'Neal features interior shots of his friends' bathroom cabinets, which, with their repositories of products by Trish McEvoy and Mario Badescu, make him a kind of Damien Hirst with product placement. A saleswoman arranging teapots, their snouts painted with songbirds, told me that although she enjoyed the artwork, none had been sold.

Downstairs, I paused near a display of Juicy Couture gold hoop earrings, and asked the sales clerk if the woman I had seen from up above was someone famous. "It was Beyoncé," she said. "She bought $200 worth of headbands." Behind a hand, she whispered: "She looks fabulous. I read somewhere that she lost all that weight drinking only water mixed with cayenne pepper." Her pupils were dilated with adoration, the shadow of Beyoncé and her satin headbands still shimmering in the air before her.

The great French stores of the 19th and early 20th centuries were places for the lower middle class to aspire to become members of the upper classes: only women of elevated social standing had the time and money for the pleasure of idle shopping. In the 21st century the elegant New York department stores are not unlike the French stores in their aspirational quality; the difference is that now, a store like Bendel's allows the nonfamous to dream of celebrity.